There's a burst of new Diablo III information available today, as Blizzard brought some folks in to get a look at how their upcoming action/RPG is shaping up. IGN has a preview of the beta, as well as word that the game will require a persistent internet connection. "In both Diablo and especially in Diablo II, I think the intuition for a lot of people when they're playing the game is 'I want to make my character offline away from that scary battle net environment. And then once I have this powerful character, I'll jump online.' But the problem with that concept is we can't really detect if they're cheating. They might have the capability to hack their character, things like that, so at that point we can't really allow that character to be in the battle net environment. Then they're going to have to restart their character, which is exactly what happened in Diablo II, which was really unfortunate," explains Blizzard's Rob Pardo. "Your character will be online on battle net the moment you start playing. You can play a solo experience like you would in Diablo II, it's just your character is on Blizzard's servers and authenticated."

There's a post on DiabloFans.com with a big rundown on their experiences along with a FAQ, photos, video, screenshots, and interviews with the developers, taking extra effort to let you avoid major spoilers. There are many revelations, perhaps the most significant of which being the ability to buy and sell in-game items in the auction house for real money. Here's a bit from the FAQ on how this will work:

Don’t Need It? Put It Up For Auction!
Nearly everything found in the game, including gold, can be exchanged with other players directly or through the auction house system. So say you’re a witch doctor and you’ve just found an incredibly rare, incredibly powerful axe that only barbarians can use. In the previous Diablo games your best option might have been to sell the axe to an in-game vendor, but in Diablo III, you now have the ability to list that axe in the auction house for your fellow barbarian players to bid on. And you know another player will probably appreciate the true value of that axe more than some heartless vendor who’ll likely just melt it down for scrap….

Amazing Search Functionality
The auction house’s "smart search" functionality can automatically sort items in the auction house based on which upgrades would be most beneficial to your character. Also, searching for the best gear for multiple characters on the same Battle.net account can be done all from the same interface without having to log out.

The Choice Is Yours
Use of either the real-money or gold-based auction house is completely optional -- that decision can be made on a per-item basis, and both versions of the auction house are functionally the same. In addition, players have the option to simply sell the items they obtain to in-game vendors for gold. They can also trade items to other players through a direct character-to-character trading system in the game in exchange for gold, other items, or just an overwhelming sense of goodwill.

Players Only
Blizzard does not plan to post items for sale in the auction house. The driving purpose of the auction house is to provide players with a fun additional in-game option for what they do with the items they obtain in the game. Items sold in the auction house will be posted by players and purchased by players.

Safe and Sanctified
The real-money auction house provides players with an easy-to-use, Blizzard-sanctioned way to collect money for items they obtain while playing Diablo III. It also helps protect players from the scams and theft often associated with questionable third-party sites by providing a secure, completely in-game method for purchasing and obtaining the items they want for their characters.

StingingVelvet wrote on Aug 2, 2011, 03:17:So if I can install the game and activate it, then "go offline" and never need a net connection again, I will buy the game. Let's hope they confirm that.

Nice to see a blue post about this, and hope it is confirmed. Bash has always been a bit...odd(?) about providing information and I definitely want a confirmation before I completely believe it. Diablo has always been a franchise I love and want everyone else to enjoy, so if this news is confirmed (Bash's post just isn't enough of a confirmation for me) and it is enough to help a few bluesnewsers here reconsider buying it, then awesome.

See my edit, ends up that post is almost a year old. That will teach me to follow people's links without looking at dates.

StingingVelvet wrote on Aug 2, 2011, 03:17:So if I can install the game and activate it, then "go offline" and never need a net connection again, I will buy the game. Let's hope they confirm that.

Nice to see a blue post about this, and hope it is confirmed. Bash has always been a bit...odd(?) about providing information and I definitely want a confirmation before I completely believe it. Diablo has always been a franchise I love and want everyone else to enjoy, so if this news is confirmed (Bash's post just isn't enough of a confirmation for me) and it is enough to help a few bluesnewsers here reconsider buying it, then awesome.

According to a Blizzard employee comment on this page of their forums they are already rolling this back due to backlash. I quote:

There is offline single player, but it's something we're going to attempt to discourage as best as possible.

A lot of us, myself included, and probably a lot of you and your friends had the exact same Diablo II experience. You get the game, start playing, your friend says let's try co-op, and when you log in your characters aren't there. After a slight freakout moment and potentially some use of Webcrawler to search the World Wide Web with Netscape 6, you realized or figured out that you had to start over. That's actually an experience that can cause someone to stop playing the game. Maybe you or I let out a huge sigh, and maybe a brief mourning period after realizing the last 60 hours were completely wasted, but we pressed on. That's not the case for everyone. Maybe most people. I actually refused to start over for a while and continued on in single-player before finally jumping on Battle.net. Who knows what a lesser man would have done...

So, if we can get people online and creating character on Battle.net from the get-go, there's less chance of that catastrophe. But there's still a play offline option, if you should need it.

So if I can install the game and activate it, then "go offline" and never need a net connection again, I will buy the game. Let's hope they confirm that.

Edit: Actually that's an old comment from almost a year ago. Disregard. It was linked to on another forum by someone acting like it was a response to today's news.

You also get financial mastermind's Pachter's ideas on Kotizzard's near future. Pachter makes clear that Kotizzard relies on its two great franchises: Call of Duty and WoW. Both, StarCraft and Diablo, he does not name. And after all, it's Pachter, you know.

Name a single event in history where hatred, fear, and greed helped to solve a crisis.

DNForever wrote on Aug 1, 2011, 23:34:Considering I don't know what ige.com is, no I haven't lately.

It is gold selling service. They sell virtual currency for all the big games. It is a big business. I don't have any details about how much they make, but I'd be shocked if it isn't many thousands every month.

I guarantee you D3 will be added to the list of supported games in short order, assuming the game goes forward as described in this news release.

Ignore for a second that Diablo 3 is basically a MMO now, with the always online requirement. I'm against this of course, even though about 85-90% of my Diablo 1 and 2 play was online coop.

This game seems like it has already been ruined by:

1) No Attribute or Skill points, instead rune(dropped items?) based character customization. This just seems insulting to me as a player, at least with no first hand experience of the new 'system.'

2) For Cash auction house, along with a separate(and thus totally worthless) non-cash auction house. This will utterly destroy the game in my opinion, between spam, farming and yes, hacking to try to make real life cash, not to mention any semblance of balance in PvP.

3) Actual gameplay, as demonstrated by the most recent videos. This game looks slow as hell compared to Diablo 2. In the midst of all this forced socialization Blizzard/Activision is trying to accomplish, it seems like they actually forgot what made Diablo 1 and 2 fun...(of course this may just be beta/alpha footage, etc.)

Oh well, Blizzard is as ruined by Activision as Bioware is ruined by EA; a real shame.

Considering I don't know what ige.com is, no I haven't lately. I just have too many porn sites to get to. Anyways this game doesn't look like my cup of tea to begin with, but all I can say is these companies must really think we are retarded.

Diablo 3 will also require a persistent Internet connection, and Blizzard's Rob Pardo agrees that it's kind of a pain in the butt. "I want to play Diablo 3 on my laptop in a plane, but, well, there are other games to play for times like that," he told 1up.

Just so we're clear, when you're bored on a plane, and you have your laptop, and you want to play the game you bought in order to fight boredom, Blizzard's official recommendation is that you play someone else's game. That's pride, right there.

That is pretty epic I bet he wasn't talking about Ubisoft games though.. hehe

I didn't read anything in that press release that bothers me. I play MMO's alot and a persistent internet connection hasn't been a problem for over a decade.Being able to play a single player mode while online is neither here nor there as long as it's not laggy once ingame. ie: The game does actually run from my computer and isn't a spawned virtual machine on some host in the US.

As for the auction house, I'm suprised it took them this long to implement it. People have been spending billions of dollars on virtual items for years now.To be honest, I'm all for the Pay to Win mechanic. There are those of us that make a decent income by working 40-60 hours a week, and others who can play that much to get the same gear.

Eve has done this for years now, with their game cards / PLEX etc.. where you could convert real money into a game card and then into ingame cash by selling the game card to a player securely through their website. (PS: It's even easier to do now)The market in eve works out the value quite effectively which allows some people with all the time in the world and no money to continue playing by using ingame currency to buy game time.The fact that D3 is doing it with gear makes bugger all difference in the scheme of things.

I guess the catch will be whether people can take the cash out of their battle.net account, or whether it's stuck there until they spend it on other b.net crap or gametime etc..

Agent.X7 wrote on Aug 1, 2011, 22:44:The Opera Ghost: Clearly you are someone's second account which is used only for crying about what Blue does, which makes you a giant hypocrite calling someone a coward whilst protecting your main user name by posting under an alias.

Congratulations, you're retarded. You win the internet!

P.S. - Rules. They are hard to follow.

What are the ground rules for forum posts?

The idea behind the news forum is to provide a place to discuss gaming news. There are very few hard and fast rules. Here they are:

1 Disagree all you want but attacks of a personal nature will not be tolerated. 2 Ethnic slurs and homophobic language will not be tolerated. 3 Do not post spam, links to warez sites, or instructions on how to obtain pirated software. 4 Abusing the forums in any manner that could be construed as 'griefing' will not be tolerated.